Placings at Gordon Dadds and Blue Prism

There were two placings announced yesterday. The first was by legal firm Gordon Dadds (GOR). I held a very few shares in the company. This company had already annoyed me by suspending the listing of the shares for several months while they finalised an acquisition deal. Totally unnecessary. If Northern Rock could remain listed while in their death throws, the propensity to suspend shares simply because there is more uncertainty about the business is not justified. This annoyance also arose at Patisserie (CAKE) recently. Investors can decide for themselves whether they want to hold the shares, and possibly take more risk, or not.

The placing by Gordon Dadds was also annoying. Apart from the dilution of 25%, it was a placing at a price of about 25% below the market price. Needless to say, this was taken up by institutional investors very promptly indeed while, as usual, private investors had no opportunity to do so. There did not seem to be any great urgency in this fund raising as it was simply to provide “financial flexibility” for their acquisition strategy. So why no full rights issue or open offer?

I simply do not wish to hold shares in companies that treat their investors this way. Those that do tend to be repeat offenders. So I sold the shares I held.

Another interesting placing was in Blue Prism (PRSM) a fast-growing supplier of office automation software, which I do not hold. The company also announced their full year results for the year to October. Revenue more than doubled to £55 million, but losses went up in a similar proportion to £26 million. The market cap is now an incredible £939 million (i.e. 17 times sales revenue).

Their placing was aimed at raising £100 million and was got away at 1100p (no significant discount to recent price but way down on a few months back). The purpose of the placing was given as this: “The Group is seeking to capitalise on the market opportunity available by accelerating its investments in distribution, its product and platform whilst maintaining its thought leadership in the RPA market.”

So it’s interesting to compare this approach with the position of Cloudcall (CALL) previously discussed who might expand faster if they raised more funds but are also loss making. Clearly Blue Prism intend to take the US approach and try to grab market leadership in a relatively new and potentially large market, i.e. it’s a land grab. This can work but the risk is that competitors who are more cost efficient can erode market share and often they all end up losing money until reality sinks in. Is what Blue Prism is doing that difficult to replicate by competitors? I do not know enough about their product to judge that but the share price and risk are too high for me.

It’s worth bearing in mind that in the software world you can sell almost anything with a good story if you spend enough. Whether such sales are really profitable can be very difficult to judge when money is also being spent at the same time to expand the business.